The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

96 The syntax of early EnglishA complement clause was normally introduced by that if it was a statement,but, as in present-day English, it was possible for that to be omitted. This phenomenon,however, seems to have been somewhat restricted in Middle English(but cf. Warner 1982: 169–70), as it also was in Old English. It is mainly foundafter seyn, thinken, witen and verbs with similar meanings, and performativeverbs like sweren, etc., when the clause reports more or less directly the actualwords spoken or thought.The most frequent type of non-finite complement in Middle English was theinfinitival construction. There had been many new developments within thisgroup since the Old English period. First, there was a difference in infinitivemarker: this could be zero (bare infinitive) or to, as in Old English, but theinnovative form for to also appeared, and the use of to increased vastly. OtherMiddle English innovations concern the much wider use of the passiveinfinitive (also preceded by to, which is never found in Old English), the extensionof constructions with a lexical subject, the introduction of the perfectinfinitive, and the so-called split infinitive.In Old English the bare infinitive was by far the most frequent of theinfinitives. This situation was completely reversed in Middle English, where theto-infinitive became the most common form and the bare infinitive came to berestricted to an increasingly smaller number of verbs. There are several causesfor this development. One may be the progressive phonological weakening ofthe infinitive marker to, which made it less meaningful, i.e. it started togrammaticalize to a ‘mere’ infinitive marker. 3 Secondly, it is very likely that toincreased its territory because it became a useful sign of the infinitive form, todistinguish it from other forms of the verb. Due to the reduction and loss ofinflections, the infinitival endings (-(i)an and -enne for the bare and inflectedinfinitive respectively) could no longer serve that purpose. The main reason,however, why the to-infinitive increased so drastically is that infinitival constructionsbegan to replace finite that-clauses (see Manabe 1989 and especially Los3The exact status of to before the infinitive in Old English is not quite clear. Althoughthe origin of to is probably that of a preposition, the to-infinitive in Old Englishclearly has verbal properties (cf. e.g. Fischer 1996b, Los 1999). It seems likely that inearly Middle English to first weakened (grammaticalized) in its purpose meaning,which among other things occasioned the rise of for to. On the other hand there isevidence that full grammaticalization did not take place (as it did in Dutch andGerman), and that to as it were became semantically replenished. Evidence for thiscan be found in the fact that for to disappeared again at the end of our period, thatsplit infinitives developed from early Middle English onward, and that to begins tofunction as a marker of indirectness in the new lexical subject constructions (moreabout this below). For a comparison of the development of to in English with thatof te and zu in Dutch and German respectively, see Fischer (1997a).